President Clinton last night put together a down-home Arkansas fund-raiser for Veep Al Gore – the man who called Sexgate “inexcusable” – in a break with the tradition that presidents stay neutral in primaries.

The goals were clear – to answer critics who see friction between Clinton and his handpicked successor, and to boost Gore, who faces an unexpectedly strong Democratic primary challenge from Bill Bradley.

The Little Rock cash bash, estimated to have raked in $250,000 to $300,000, was billed as their first joint stop on the Gore campaign trail since the veep kicked off his 2000 quest June 16 with a blast at his boss’s hanky-panky with Monica Lewinsky.

“Inexcusable,” Gore said then. “And particularly as a father, I felt that it was wrong. I thought it was awful.”

At the time, the White House quickly sent out angry signals that Clinton was ticked off – and then flip-flopped and insisted those signals were misread and there wasn’t any friction.

Presidents normally stay out of primaries, but Clinton is pushing hard for Gore, whose election – and that of first lady Hillary Clinton, if she runs for Senate in New York – could be seen as a confirmation of Clinton’s legacy.

This spring, Clinton irked Gore by backseat-driving his campaign and telling a New York Times reporter that it had troubles but was getting better – hardly a rave endorsement.

Gore’s campaign has been rocked by self-inflicted wounds from his claim to have invented the Internet to his photo opportunity in a canoe that wasted perhaps 500 millions of gallons of water in a drought area.

Now Gore is having trouble raising campaign cash and his high-overhead staff is burning up the bucks, so Clinton plans four more fund-raisers, on his own, to help fill Gore’s coffers.

Even the veep’s backers are worried about his fund-raising that, coupled with his weak showing against GOP front-runner George W. Bush in polls, has produced a growing Gore malaise among Democrats.

In the first half of 1999, Bush out-raised Gore by more than 2-1 – pulling in $37 million to Gore’s $17.5 million while Bradley, battling an incumbent vice president, pulled in $11.7 million, an impressive showing.

In fact, Gore’s staff raised some eyebrows by inflating their fund-raising estimates before the reports became public – they said they’d raised $18.2 to $18.5 million, but that counted legal expenses that aren’t normally included.